Posts tagged with EDUCATION (PRE-SCHOOL)

CHICAGO — A few years ago, a boy here was on the verge of being expelled because his teacher felt he was a danger to his classmates.

He was 4 years old, in preschool.

This situation is all too common. Preschoolers are expelled at three times the rate of children in kindergarten through 12th grade, with African-American boys being most vulnerable.

This boy — I’ll call him Danny — was lucky, though. His teacher received assistance from a specialist, Lauren Wiley, an early childhood mental health consultant. Wiley started off by listening. The teacher had said she thought Danny (not his real name) needed to be medicated for attention deficit disorder, or A.D.D. Then she admitted she was angry with him. Her job was to keep her students safe, she said, and the boy’s aggression made her feel like a failure. Read more…

Whenever President Obama proposes a major federal investment in early education, as he did in his two most recent State of the Union addresses, critics have a two-word riposte: Head Start. Researchers have long cast doubt on that program’s effectiveness. The most damning evidence comes from a 2012 federal evaluation that used gold-standard methodology and concluded that children who participated in Head Start were not more successful in elementary school than others. That finding was catnip to the detractors. “Head Start’s impact is no better than random,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized. Why throw good money after bad?

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Children in 1990 in the Head Start program in Lampasas, Tex.Credit Eli Reed/Magnum Photos

Though the faultfinders have a point, the claim that Head Start has failed overstates the case. For one thing, it has gotten considerably better in the past few years because of tougher quality standards. For another, researchers have identified a “sleeper effect” — many Head Start youngsters begin to flourish as teenagers, maybe because the program emphasizes character and social skills as well as the three R’s. Still, few would give Head Start high marks, and the bleak conclusion of the 2012 evaluation stands in sharp contrast to the impressive results from well-devised studies of state-financed prekindergartens. Read more…

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Gail Collins: David, I thought we’d go rogue today and talk about things we think President Obama is doing well. Unless, of course, you have a more pressing topic.

David Brooks: Are you hoping to have the world’s shortest conversation?

No, I’m kidding. There are many things President Obama is doing well. And I do believe that we (and when I say “we” I mean me) have a tendency to be too critical. That’s in part because it’s easier to write a good critical column than a good positive column.

Gail: That’s certainly why I’ve become so attached to Chris Christie.

David: It’s because people think you are smarter when you are negative than when you are positive. Book review readers, for example, believe that authors of critical reviews are smarter than authors of positive reviews. It flatters our vanity to be tough. Hence the truism that each journalist is corrupted by one central bias — the desire to show we are smarter than whomever it is we are writing about.

What’s missing in the current debate over economic inequality is enough serious discussion about investing in effective early childhood development from birth to age 5. This is not a big government boondoggle policy that would require a huge redistribution of wealth. Acting on it would, however, require us to rethink long-held notions of how we develop productive people and promote shared prosperity.

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Credit Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch

Everyone knows that education boosts productivity and enlarges opportunities, so it is natural that proposals for reducing inequality emphasize effective education for all. But these proposals are too timid. They ignore a powerful body of research in the economics of human development that tells us which skills matter for producing successful lives. They ignore the role of families in producing the relevant skills They also ignore or play down the critical gap in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children that emerges long before they enter school. Read more…